Welcome to the 17th (free!) “Dear Lucky Agent” Contest on the GLA blog. This is a recurring online contest with agent judges and super-cool prizes. Here’s the deal: With every contest, the details are essentially the same, but the niche itself changes—meaning each contest is focused around a specific category or two. So if you’re writing women’s fiction, this 17th contest is for you! (The contest is live through EOD, Friday, Oct. 17, 2014.)

WHY YOU SHOULD GET EXCITED

After a previous “Dear Lucky Agent” contest, the agent judge, Tamar Rydzinski (The Laura Dail Literary Agency), signed one of the three contest winners. After Tamar signed the writer, she went on to sell two of that writer’s books! How cool! That’s why these contests are not to missed if you have an eligible submission.

Your query letter, as well as the first 150-200 words of your unpublished, completed book-length work of adult women’s fiction. You must include a contact e-mail address with your entry and use your real name. Also, submit the title of the work and a logline (one-sentence description of the work) with each entry.

Please note: To be eligible to submit, you must mention this contest twice through any any social-media. Please provide a social-media link or Twitter handle or screenshot or blog post URL, etc., with your official e-mailed entry so the judge and I can verify eligibility. Some previous entrants could not be considered because they skipped this step! Simply spread the word twice through any means and give us a way to verify you did; a tinyURL for this link/contest for you to easily use is http://tinyurl.com/of5zgqz. An easy way to notify me of your sharing is to include my Twitter handle @chucksambuchino at the end of your mention(s) if using Twitter. If we’re friends on FB, tag me in the mention. And if you are going to solely use Twitter as your 2 times, please wait 1 day between mentions to spread out the notices, rather than simply tweeting twice back to back. Thanks. (Please note that simply tweeting me does not count. You have to include the contest URL with your mention; that’s the point. And if you use Twitter, put my handle @chucksambuchino at the middle or the end, not at the very beginning of the tweet.)

Here is a sample tweet you can use (feel free to tweak): New FREE contest for writers of women’s fiction http://tinyurl.com/of5zgqz Judged by agent @PaulaSMunier – via @chucksambuchino

WHAT IS ELIGIBLE?

Women’s fiction (also called upmarket fiction when dealing with women’s stories). If you’re wondering what falls into this genre specifically, this is how our agent judge explains it: “These are stories that revolve around women, women’s roles as mothers, daughters, grandmothers, granddaughters, caregivers, friends, community leaders, etc., and a woman’s place at home, at work, and in society at large. They are for the most part domestic dramas. What separates them from love stories is that the heroine’s relationships with her friends and family are as important if not more important to the storyline as her love relationship. These stories explore women’s relationships—with each other, with men and children, with the world, and with herself. The themes are those that strike a chord with women: love, family, friendship, sisterhood, motherhood, self-actualization, and what it means to be a woman in the world, past, present, and future.”

Please note that YA fiction is not eligible for this (i.e., no teen protagonists), nor is erotica.

CONTEST DETAILS

This contest will be live through the end of Oct. 17, 2014, PST. Winners notified by e-mail within approximately three weeks of end of contest. Winners announced on the blog thereafter.

To enter, submit the first 150-200 words of your book as well as your one-page query. Shorter or longer entries will not be considered. Keep it within word count range please.

You can submit as many times as you wish. You can submit even if you submitted to other contests in the past, but please note that past winners cannot win again. All that said, you are urged to only submit your best work.

The contest is open to everyone of all ages, save those employees, officers and directors of GLA’s publisher, F+W Media, Inc.

By e-mailing your entry, you are submitting an entry for consideration in this contest and thereby agreeing to the terms written here as well as any terms possibly added by me in the “Comments” section of this blog post. (If you have questions or concerns, write me personally at chuck.sambuchino (at) fwmedia.com. The Gmail account above is for submissions, not questions.)

PRIZES!!!

Top 3 winners all get: 1) A critique of the first 10 double-spaced pages of your work, by your agent judge. 2) A free one-year subscription to WritersMarket.com ($50 value)!

MEET YOUR (AWESOME) AGENT JUDGE!

Paula Munier, Senior Literary Agent & Content Strategist at Talcott Notch Literary, has created and marketed exceptional content in all formats across all markets for such media giants as WGBH, Fidelity, and Disney. A writer and editor before becoming an agent in 2012, she’s always looking for good crime fiction, women’s fiction, mainstream fiction, high-concept YA and SF/Fantasy fiction, as well as nonfiction. She’s written several books, including Plot Perfect: How to Build Unforgettable Stories Scene by Scene and Fixing Freddie.

PAULA’S FORTHCOMING FICTION SALES

THE REGISTRY TRILOGY (William Morrow/HarperCollins)By Shannon StokerThe Registry, The Collection, and The Alliance
The exciting trilogy set in a United States in which girls are breeders and the prettiest girls go to the highest bidders – and telling the story of the one beautiful young woman who refuses to play by those rules.

ORPHAN # 8 (William Morrow/HarperCollins)By Kim van AlkemadeComing in 2015
An orphan, subjected to experimental X-ray treatments at the orphanage, escapes to make a new life for herself, only to face her tormentor years later, inspired by the real-life Hebrew Orphan Asylum of Manhattan.

CHRISTMAS CHOCOLAT (Kensington)By Kate DefriseComing in 2015
Armed with nothing but insecurities, rivalries, and their mother’s recipe for Belgian chocolate mousse, siblings make their way from around the world to the family estate in Pennsylvania — where their father, the memory of their mother, and long-held family secrets all collide on Christmas Eve.

BEELINE TO MURDER: A Henny Penny Farmette Mystery (Kensington)By Meera LesterComing in 2015
Inspired by the author’s real-life Henny Penny Farmette homestead and blog, the first in a new series featuring a former San Francisco Bay Area police detective, who leaves the force and retreats to the country only to find herself caught in a black swarm of blackmail and betrayal — a veritable beeline to murder.

SNIPER (Skyhorse)By Vaughn Hardacker
A Boston homicide detective’s investigation of a sniper attack on Boston Common draws the former Marine sniper into a cat-and-mouse game with the killer that takes him from the streets of Boston to a remote island off the coast of Maine for a final deadly showdown.